The transition from July to August wasn’t the most productive time I’ve had, but I still managed to get something going on. Having assignments, capstones and a bunch of things during my Master’s is taking me some time, but next month my schedules are more stable, so I think I can put more work on my own projects.

That being said, here are the things I worked on during this time, followed by a brief reflection on what I might work on in the future.

Pokémon: Fake Version

One of the things I had in my last update was creating a top-down adventure game and that I was going for what basically is Pokémon Roguelike. I ended up working on it for 3 weeks and I got something that I actually like, but I don’t think it was very fun or compelling, so I chose to not work on it anymore.

The way the dungeon works is a simple dungeon and lock “puzzle”, the generation is based on The Legend of Zelda rooms, which there are plenty of tutorials and algorithms to generate rooms on this logic. The dungeon is generated, then the algorithm detects rooms that can be boss rooms and reward rooms, it then places the boss, the reward room and locks them (the rocks in the screenshot) – a key for the boss room is randomly placed on the dungeon and the boss drops the key for the reward room.

Aside from the dungeon generation, everything else is basically Pokémon reverse engineering, which could also lead to an interesting technical post, but the code was written in a hurry and doesn’t really follow good standards.

Getting into Unreal

One of my goals is to get into Unreal and do at least 1 or 2 small projects on it, using blueprints, C++, having animations and AI. This last month I could dedicate 1 or 2 days for getting at least a glimpse of how Unreal Engine works. But nothing very significant was achieved.

Midnight Journey

One of the things I am working on is Midnight Journey, a simple platformer game, when I first started working on it I was aiming to finish by August 21 (also known as today!) – I had no idea of what was coming for me at the time and I didn’t really anticipate how much out of time I would be to work on that.

Needless to say, Midnight Journey is not even close to completion, in fact, I didn’t even touch it last month.

Next Month

The biggest thing for next month is that I was accepted into my capstone of choice on my Master’s, that means from now on I will basically be on a 9 to 5, which hopefully will give me more time to work on side projects and learn new stuff. I will be working on game development on those hours, but for NDA reasons those things won’t make into the updates probably, unless in occasions where the game is released and I make some kind of tech post about it (which I definitely plan to do)

About Midnight Journey, I like the game and I think I’m up to something good, but Level Design is something I am struggling with during the development and I came to realize it is something I’m not particularly skilled at and I don’t have a lot of interest either, so building a platformer (which requires a ton of Level Design) is kind of slowly leaving my interest, next month will tell if I keep it or not.

If I don’t keep working on it, I’m also at a loss of what I should try, I like roguelikes, which solves the Level Design aspect of the equation with a coded system, and roguelike players don’t really expect much variety or well crafted Level Design. I would have to research and think things that play to my strengths and could be fully finished games, considering I want to go for a Gameplay Programmer job in the industry.

Anyway, I won’t keep a list of what I want or don’t want to do for the next month, I will try working on what I have and see where it takes me!

Thanks for the read and follow me on twitter if you want!